Evangelicals, gender, and anxiety

A recent meeting of the Conference on Faith and History featured a paper session titled “20th century evangelicalism.” Surprisingly, all three papers focused on conservative Protestant gender ideologies in the years since World War II. 

Just a few years ago, I would have expected studies of evangelicalism to emphasize political influence. Is gender the hot new topic in evangelical studies? If so, why, and what does the shift reveal about both the way evangelicals present themselves and the way scholars see them?

Calling attention to evangelicals’ distinctive gender ideologies, and associating those ideologies with evangelicals’ politics, makes a lot of sense. Seth Dowland asserts in his forthcoming book Family Values: Gender, Authority, and the Rise of the Christian Right that the rhetoric of family values “provided coherence for the Christian right.” This rhetoric also revealed “two primary beliefs at the core of conservative evangelicalism”: (1) that gender is a God-given, biological category, not a malleable social construction; and (2) “that lines of authority matter and must be observed in order for society to function well.”